70s Movies Trivia
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109 free 70s Movies trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
51 free 70s Movies trivia questions with answers. The 1970s gave Hollywood the blockbuster, the New Hollywood auteurs and the disaster movie all at once. This quiz covers the decade's films from Airport and Love Story to Alien and Kramer vs. Kramer: The Godfather and Brando's refused Oscar, Jaws and its broken shark, Star Wars and the merchandising deal, Rocky's million-dollar budget, The Exorcist's Best Picture nomination, Cuckoo's Nest's Big Five, Annie Hall beating Star Wars, Grease and Saturday Night Fever, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, Network, Dog Day Afternoon, Apocalypse Now's nightmare shoot, Halloween's $1.98 mask, Monty Python's rock-star financiers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Willy Wonka, Animal House, Enter the Dragon, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Carrie, Superman, Mad Max, Cabaret, Deliverance, Patton and Barry Lyndon. Easy questions ask who directed Jaws and who played Rocky. Medium ones cover Oscars, sequels and famous lines. Hard ones want the film that first sold the 70s disaster genre, the bands who bankrolled the Holy Grail, the budget of American Graffiti and which 1972 musical holds the record for most Oscars without Best Picture. Every answer has been checked against reference articles on each film, and each question shows its citation once you have answered. Built for movie nights, retro parties and anyone who grew up in a cinema in the seventies.
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Q 01Who directed The Godfather (1972)?
Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola shared an Oscar with Mario Puzo for the script they wrote together, yet lost Best Director that night, even as The Godfather took Best Picture.
Q 02Who took the stage in Marlon Brando's place when he won Best Actor for The Godfather?
Sacheen Littlefeather
Sacheen Littlefeather, an actress and activist, brushed aside the statuette Roger Moore held out and said Brando could not accept it because of Hollywood's treatment of Native Americans.
Q 03The Godfather Part II (1974) made Academy Awards history how?
It was the earliest sequel to win Best Picture
It was the earliest sequel to win Best Picture and stayed the only one for 29 years, until The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King; its six Oscars doubled the original's three.
Q 04Who directed Jaws (1975)?
Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg directed Jaws at 27; shooting at sea off Martha's Vineyard ran months over schedule, and the film became the highest-grossing release to that point.
Q 05Why does the shark appear so little in Jaws?
The mechanical sharks kept malfunctioning
The mechanical sharks kept malfunctioning at sea, so the director kept the animal out of sight and let John Williams's two-note theme announce it instead.
Q 06Which 1973 hit gave George Lucas the leverage to secure the merchandising and sequel rights to Star Wars?
American Graffiti
American Graffiti cost $777,000 and became one of the most profitable films on record, so Lucas could pass up a bigger fee for Star Wars and bargain for the sequel and merchandising rights instead.
Q 07Star Wars was distributed in 1977 by which studio?
Twentieth Century-Fox
Twentieth Century-Fox backed the film because executive Alan Ladd Jr. believed in George Lucas more than in the project: as Lucas later put it, Ladd invested in him rather than in the film.
Q 08Who wrote and starred in Rocky (1976)?
Sylvester Stallone
Sylvester Stallone wrote the script in a matter of days and insisted on starring, turning down larger offers; made for about $1 million, Rocky won Best Picture.
Q 09One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) did what at the Oscars for only the second time?
Win the 'Big Five'
Win the 'Big Five' means taking Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay, as only It Happened One Night had before; Louise Fletcher signed her thanks to her deaf parents from the stage.
Q 10Which film beat Star Wars to the Best Picture Oscar for 1977?
Annie Hall
Annie Hall won four Oscars to the six of Star Wars, yet took Best Picture, Director and Screenplay; Woody Allen skipped the ceremony to play clarinet with his jazz band, as he did every Monday.
Q 11Who plays Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976)?
Robert De Niro
Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle, a Vietnam veteran driving a night cab; the film won the 1976 Palme d'Or, and John Hinckley Jr., fixated on it and on Jodie Foster, shot President Reagan in 1981.
Q 12Chinatown (1974) is loosely inspired by which real-life events?
The California water wars
The California water wars set Los Angeles against Owens Valley farmers, who dynamited the aqueduct draining their valley; Robert Towne's script turns the fight into a 1930s murder mystery.
Q 13In Grease (1978), Sandy is a transfer student from which country?
Australia
Q 21Which French director acts in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) as scientist Claude Lacombe?
François Truffaut
François Truffaut, the New Wave director of The 400 Blows, plays Claude Lacombe, the French scientist leading the UFO investigation, in his only appearance in an American film.
Q 22Who directed Superman (1978), starring Christopher Reeve?
Richard Donner
Richard Donner directed Superman, shooting it back-to-back with much of Superman II before he was replaced on the sequel by Richard Lester.
Q 23Michael Myers's mask in Halloween (1978) was made from a shop-bought mask of which TV character?
Captain Kirk
Sandy comes from Australia; the character was American in the stage show and was rewritten after Olivia Newton-John, who was raised there, was cast.
Q 14Which 1977 hit grew from a magazine article about New York clubgoers that its author admitted largely inventing?
Saturday Night Fever
Saturday Night Fever came from Nik Cohn's 1976 story 'Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night'; two decades later he admitted his disco king was modelled on a Mod he had known in London.
Q 15Who plays Ripley in Alien (1979)?
Sigourney Weaver
Sigourney Weaver got Ripley, her first leading film role, after the makers decided that the hero, first conceived as a man, should be a woman; she returned for three sequels.
Q 16Apocalypse Now (1979) is loosely based on which novella?
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness supplied the river journey toward a renegade named Kurtz; the film moves it from the Congo to wartime Vietnam and Cambodia.
Q 17Which star suffered a heart attack during the Apocalypse Now shoot?
Martin Sheen
Martin Sheen, then 36, had to struggle to a road to find help when the heart attack struck in the Philippines; he was back on set as Captain Willard within weeks.
Q 18The Sting (1973) reunited which two stars of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?
Paul Newman and Robert Redford
Paul Newman and Robert Redford play con men for their Butch Cassidy director, George Roy Hill; the film's Scott Joplin score sent 'The Entertainer', a 1902 piano rag, to No. 3 in the 1974 pop charts.
Q 19A Clockwork Orange (1971) was adapted from a novel by which author?
Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess ended his novel with Alex outgrowing violence, but the American edition cut that final chapter, and Stanley Kubrick's film follows the darker American version.
Q 20In The French Connection (1971), Gene Hackman plays a detective with what nickname?
Popeye
Popeye was the real nickname of Eddie Egan, the New York narcotics detective Doyle is based on; Egan appears in the film himself, playing Doyle's supervisor.
Captain Kirk it was: the mask had been cast from William Shatner's face, and production designer Tommy Lee Wallace widened its eye holes and spray-painted it white.
Q 24Who plays Willy Wonka in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)?
Gene Wilder
Gene Wilder plays Wonka in a film Roald Dahl, credited with the script, disowned; among his complaints was that it favoured Wonka over Charlie.
Q 25Who was Mel Brooks's original choice to play Sheriff Bart in Blazing Saddles (1974)?
Richard Pryor
Richard Pryor helped write the script, but the studio reportedly would not accept him as the star, so the part of Sheriff Bart went to Cleavon Little.
Q 26Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) was partly financed by which rock bands?
Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd
Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd each put money into the film when no studio would; Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson and record labels such as Charisma also invested.
Q 27In The Deer Hunter (1978), the steelworkers are from a town near which city?
Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh lies just north of Clairton, the characters' steel town, yet none of the film was shot there: mill towns across Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia stood in for it.
Q 28Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) won Best Picture and acting Oscars for Dustin Hoffman and whom?
Meryl Streep
Meryl Streep won Best Supporting Actress as Joanna Kramer after rewriting her character's courtroom speech herself; that night she left her new Oscar behind on a bathroom floor.
Q 29Dirty Harry (1971) drew on the real case of which murderer?
The Zodiac Killer
The Zodiac Killer taunted the San Francisco area with coded letters and threatened a school bus; the film's Scorpio hijacks one, but unlike him the real killer was never identified.
Q 30Enter the Dragon (1973) was notable as what for Bruce Lee?
His final completed film
His final completed film opened in Hong Kong six days after Bruce Lee died on 20 July 1973, aged 32; he had set aside Game of Death to make it, and never finished that one.